hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3237.txt

Episode: 3237
Title: HPR3237: Cloning a Hard Drive with Clonezilla
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3237/hpr3237.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 19:19:47

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This is Hacker Public Radio episode 3237 for Tuesday, 29th of December 2020, today's show
is entitled, Cloning a Hard Drive with Clone Zilla, It is hosted by John Colp, and in about
18 minutes long, and Karim a clean flag.
The summary is, I had some hard drive failures recently, and I'm getting back to the habit
of cloning for backups.
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Hey everybody, this is John Colp in Lafayette, Louisiana, yes I'm still alive, it's been a
long time since I've contributed anything to HBR, and to be honest a long time since
I've actually listened to anything on HBR.
You would think that a pandemic would be the perfect time to contribute more, and catch
up and listen more, but in fact it's been maybe the most busy and difficult year of my
career in higher education so far because of all the things, but anyway we're wrapping
it down.
Now I'm about to turn in my grades tomorrow, and I'm going to have some time ahead of
me where I can hopefully catch up on listening to the shows and maybe even contribute a few.
I've got a whole list of topics that I have intended to talk about for the last year or
so, but I have not gotten around to any of them, and I don't know how useful the one today
is going to be, but I was just about to do something, and I thought maybe I should talk
about this and record it for HBR just to kind of get back in the groove of things.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to clone the drive of my work laptop.
I'm going to do this because I've had kind of a series of misadventures with my laptop
for work, started out by upgrading the hard drive from the standard state issued 500
gigs to one terabyte because I was running out of space, and that's because I teach
music and I have a lot of music files on there, and they tend to accumulate quickly, and
I was just running out of space, and so I wanted to upgrade to a terabyte, so I bought
a terabyte hard drive and installed it, and well, before I installed it, I cloned the
old one over to it and then used G-parted to expand the Linux partition to fit the rest
of the drive.
It dual boots, windows, and Linux, and that was great, I was super happy, I forget exactly
what kind of drive it was, it was C gate, maybe, and I think it was some kind of hybrid
spinning in solid state, and it seemed to work fine, but then about two weeks ago, I started
noticing weird things happening while I was teaching my class online, and later that day,
it just died, it stopped responding, and I was left with a brick, and so I got a recommendation
from our IT department to get a solid state drive by a company called Mushkin, and so I
ordered a one terabyte solid state drive, that's the other thing about this whole thing,
I can't believe how cheap solid state drives have gotten in the last few years, it seems
like it wasn't that long ago that even to get one as, I don't know, as small as 128 gigs
was a few hundred dollars, but I got a one terabyte solid state drive for about $70, maybe
$80, it wasn't very much, and so when that came in, I went through that whole process
again, I still had the 500 gig drive, and so I used that same drive to clone once again
over to the one terabyte drive, and got it all set up, and I had made a backup onto my
iDrive account, maybe 10 days before the failure, and so I lost some files, but not a ton,
but I'm determined not to lose any files anymore, and so what I'm going to do today is clone
the one terabyte drive that's inside my laptop over to another drive that I've purchased
out of, not using state of Louisiana money, but just my own money, I bought a, this is a
one terabyte solid state drive by 11, but LEVEN, I think I never heard of them, but I got
decent reviews on Amazon, and it's the right size, so what I'm going to do is just make
an exact copy of the one that's in there, and I'm going to start trying to do this about
once a week, and so that way I will always have a very recent copy, so that if it fails again,
I can just pop it in there, it seems like a small price to pay $70 or so, maybe $75 to have
that peace of mind to know that the files that I need for my work will not just be gone.
All right, so what I've got is the laptop, incidentally the other thing I found out when
I was replacing the hard drive most recently was that my battery, this is a Dell Latitude E 5470,
it's maybe three years old, maybe four years old, I can't remember exactly when I got it.
It's a decent, decent laptop, it's got the touchscreen, I upgraded the RAM to 32GB, so it actually
performs really well, but when I opened it up I discovered that the battery was bulging so much
that I can't even close the case anymore, so I also ordered a new battery, and I will be
replacing that as soon as it comes in. So I've got the external drive, and I've got a device here
made by a company called Cables to Go that allows me to plug the drive in just bare,
and then use a USB cable to connect it up to the laptop, so I think what I'll do is shut down
the laptop, and I'm going to boot from a flash drive that has Clonzilla on it, and by the way,
this is a pro tip, if you find you've got a box full of flash drives and some of them are very small,
this one is a 512 megabyte flash drive, which is hardly big enough to do anything with nowadays,
but it's big enough to keep Clonzilla on, because Clonzilla only takes about 300 megs,
so that's a little pro tip there, if you've got a small hard drive sitting around, I'm a flash drive
sitting around that you're not sure what to do with, loaded up with Clonzilla, or G-Party Live,
or something like that, so that's, keep that handy, I'm going to shut down, close out of things,
and shut down the laptop. One thing I'm curious to see here is that since I've got
a solid-state drive inside the machine, and I'm copying to a solid-state drive, I'm curious how
long this is going to take, because it took a little while when I was cloning from my spinning
drive to another spinning drive, or from the spinning drive to the solid-state drive, I'm guessing
it's going to go quicker when they are both solid-state, but we will see if I'm right about that.
Okay, close out all these things, you shut down, and then I will plug in my Clonzilla drive on one
side, and I've got to hook up, so on the cables to go hard drive adapter thingy, I've got to plug
in the power cord on one part of the SATA connection. Okay, that's plugged in, and be sure to switch
on the power to it. One time I was trying to use Clonzilla, and I kept turning, why is it not finding
my drive? I had not turned on the power to the drive, and so of course, that's like the old
IT crowd thing, is it plugged in? Well, it was plugged in, but it wasn't turned on.
Okay, so now I will plug, I've got both cable, I've got the SATA data cable plugged in and the power
cable, and I'm going to plug the flash drive part into the laptop, so that it will find it,
now I'll turn on the laptop by pressing power, and I can never remember whether it's F2 or F12,
that gets me to the boot menu, so I'll press both, kind of one after the other, one, two, one, two,
and usually it, okay, it's preparing one time boot menu, so whichever one it was, it seems to
work. Okay, now under Legacy Boot, I will choose to boot from the USB storage device,
and I can see the LED on the end of my Clonzilla drive going crazy over there, so it's doing the
right thing, I'm going to boot from the default settings on Clonzilla Live, that's VGA 800 by 600,
so not very high the resolution, but it should work okay. By the way, I hope the audio sounds okay,
and I'm just using my Zoom recorder without a lapel mic, and so it's a little bit further away
from my mouth than I like to do normally, but hopefully it'll sound okay.
One of the episodes I have on my to-do list is an episode about a Sony microphone that I've got,
that I haven't used for a while, because the device that I used to use it with is dead,
I used it with a mini disc recorder, okay, now I'm at the language preference, I'll choose English,
keep the default layout, okay, and then I can either start Clonzilla or enter the shell, so I'm
going to start Clonzilla, and you've got some choices here, you can work with images or devices,
or a combination of both, so the first option is device to image, or vice versa, the next option
of what I want, device to device, directly from one disc or partition to another disc or partition,
so what I'm going to do is make an exact clone of the entire drive that's in there to another drive
of exactly the same size, so it should be pretty straightforward. I'm going to go to beginner mode,
I don't need the expert mode here, and the options in the next screen are disc to local disc,
or partition to local partition, or exit to a command line problem, so I'm going to do disc to local
disc, and so now what it's going to do is look around to try to find my discs, and it's found to
SDA and SDC, SDA is the internal drive, and SDC is the one on the USB,
that's just, it's always important to double check these things, because you could end up really
screwing things up if you choose the wrong thing, SDA is internal SDC, okay, wait, I just want to
verify here, js, yeah, okay, I'm looking at the label on my external drive, it says js dash 600,
and that's also what SDC 1000 gigabytes says js 600 megabyte, okay, so choose local disc as source,
I'm going to choose SDA, and now the only one left, as target is SDC, I'm going to skip the file
system check, and then the last thing it asks you is whether what you want to do when it's finished,
choose reboot slash shutdown, when everything is finished, or inner command line, or shutdown,
you can choose, and I'm just going to choose default, which is to give me an option once it gets there,
okay, this says next time you can run this commit, so it shows you next the entire command that
it's about to execute, and if you wanted to take a note of that, I guess you could, I'm not going
to bother, so it's almost ready to go, and it has this big warning, warning warning warning,
the existing data in this hard disk will be overwritten, make sure you want to do this,
do you really want to do this, and so it says the device SDC will be overwritten, and you sure
you want to do it, so you have to type the letter y for yes, and then ask you one more time, are you
really sure, okay, let's do it, and off it goes, do I want to clone the boot letter, that's the last
question, yes, okay, it's collecting partition info on the source and target, and then it will
start going, so I'm going to start my timer on my phone's clock, and what is that thing called,
a stopwatch, let me see how long it takes, where's my clock app, stopwatch, I'm going to start it
now, and I'll try to remember to look at that when it's done, or I guess it will, I think it
actually tells me how much time it took to do the various things, I don't remember, anyway,
I think what I'm going to do is stop the recording for now, because this is the boring part where it's
just like, I mean you could watch the progress bar, but it would be even more boring to listen to
me watching the progress bar, all right, back in a bit,
I'm back, it probably only seems like a second
to you but it's actually been three hours and 55 minutes since I started the process
of the cloning and that's actually not too bad that's quicker that's definitely quicker
than it was to do the other the spinning hard drives I didn't actually time that one
but I know it took longer I think I just left it running during the night and came back
and dealt with it the next morning but anyway it's all done and now it has come up with
the menu where I can choose either to power off or reboot or enter a command line prompt
or start over boy I would hate to have to start over at this point so I think what I'm
going to do is choose to power off and with that it will be done and next time I'll probably
do this like right before I go to bed I'll start it off and then it will just do it while
I'm asleep and that way I won't have to deal with it at all I'll just deal with it in the
morning okay well I guess that's it hope that's been somewhat interesting or helpful or
whatever clonzilla is a great tool for cloning your drives doing these kind of comprehensive backups
I've used it for years although it's been a few years since I used it but for a time there I
did it like every week and I think it was when I was running a distro that was less stable than
what I'm using now I'm still on Ubuntu 16.04 because that is the one where my voice command
still work the I use Jezre's Blather program to run all kinds of stuff on my computer and the
latest I mean that the more recent long term support versions of Ubuntu have a different version
of the sound libraries and it breaks compatibility and so I've not upgraded this laptop yet
but there was a time where I used clonzilla at least once a week to clone things to make sure I
always had a version saved to a backup where I could pop it in there and get back in business if
something got hosed so hopefully the fact that I'm this prepared means that nothing bad will
happen and I can just keep having my backup and not having to crack open the laptop and put a
different hard drive in there anyway that's all for this time I hope you've enjoyed that it's
been fun talking to you again and I hope I will have occasion to record something else very soon
until next time this has been John Culp and Lafayette Louisiana bye y'all
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